Eurogamer has a follow-up to EA's recent comments on OnLive, as CFO Eric Brown discussed the cloud gaming service in an address at the UBS Annual Media and Communications Conference in New York. He expresses doubts about the costs of the service, apparently unaware of OnLive's recent change in business model. He also echoes the common sentiment that latency will be an issue. "When it comes to videogames, particularly first person shooter games, anything less than a response time of 30 or 40 milliseconds is unacceptable and by definition anything going through a streaming platform is going to go through a series of switches etc.," he said "So the question I have long term is can that latency be overcome?"

ibm wrote on Dec 8, 2010, 07:31:Doesn't seem that long ago when 150ms was very acceptable. If you had lower than that you were a LPB and usually labelled a cheat

I must be a LPB, then...I haven't considered a ping of 150ms as acceptable since pre-1996.

America is behind the curve on broadband, but it isn't like it's unobtainable to a vast chunk of the market, now. Sure, having a low ping will make OnLine work better, but it's also going to increase the user's expectations - OnLive is always going to have more latency.

It might look great on paper, and may even work well for a certain subset of games. But I can't see how it can ever be successful as anything other than a cheaper alternative to consoles.